Artificial ices are structures in which the constituents obey analogues of the ‘two-in two-out’ Pauling's ice rule that determines the proton positional ordering in water ice; they provide a material-by-design approach to physical properties and functionalities. Artificial ice can be created from ferromagnetic islands and connected wires as well as from topological components such as superconducting vortices and from non-magnetic colloidal particles. Among them, artificial spin ice is the most investigated system that was first demonstrated in a square lattice of elongated interacting ferromagnetic nano-islands. In this case, the ice rule corresponds to two spins pointing inward and two pointing outward at the vertex of a square lattice. Extensive experiments have been conducted using various thermal and magnetization approaches to obtain ordered states of the spin ice. Long-range ordering was realized in the diagonally polarized magnetic state through the magnetization method. For the nominal ground state, sizeable domains and crystallites were obtained in as-grown samples, and larger domains were obtained in samples heated above their Curie temperatures (˜500° C. for permalloy island analysis). At room temperature, long-range ordering of the ground state has only been achieved in ultrathin (3 nm thick) samples via thermal relaxation. Other spin/charge configurations have only been observed locally and at crystallite boundaries. The difficulty in creating tailored multiple ordered states limits the experimental investigation of the spin and magnetic charge dynamics that can emerge from/between the ordered states, especially for a thermally stable (athermal) sample at room temperature. This also hinders the potential applications of artificial ice for data storage, memory and logic devices, or as a medium for reconfigurable magnetics.